~ Alison Crump, Marianopolis College
~ Lauren Halcomb-Smith, Deakin University
After seven years of managing J-BILD, it is time for a new chapter for J-BILD. After many long discussions and much individual reflection, Lauren and I have decided that the time is right for us to step down from our respective roles as J-BILD Managing Editor and Senior Managing Editor. As the architects and co-founders of J-BILD, we are committed to mentoring the next managing editor team into these roles. The call for applications is on our website for now, until the process is complete.
We hope that as the journal embarks on its next chapter, the seed of an idea that Lauren and I had for this journal back in 2016 will continue to grow. We wanted to provide a space for scholarly publishing that emphasizes scholarly rigour, open access, community, peer mentorship, and collaboration. We always feel it is important to remind readers that J-BILD is an entirely volunteer-run journal that relies upon the contributions of many who share our values and vision for scholarly publishing. J-BILD occupies a space in the publishing landscape that pushes against normative standards in commercial publishing (paywalls, anonymity, and metrics) and privileges a critical, gentle disruption of norms in the production of scholarship.
We published the first J-BILD issue in fall 2017, and after 8 volumes and 13 issues between the two of us, including this one, we have given birth to (or continued to raise) 5 children, undergone three geographical moves, in one case across a very large ocean, and found our respective footings in our post-PhD careers in higher education — Alison as Associate Dean, Programs at Marianopolis College in Montreal, and Lauren as Manager, Scholarly Communication and Research Outputs at Deakin University in Australia. Along the way, J-BILD has kept us connected to each other, to shifts and movements in sociolinguistics research and in scholarly publishing, and to emerging scholars.
What a tremendous journey this has been for us! We are tremendously grateful to J-BILD authors, peer mentors, and copy editors for the trust they have put in our model of publishing. J-BILD, we will be cheering you on!
Article Summaries
Research Studies
In « Penser avec les théories : perspective translangagière (translanguaging) et création d’histoires bilingues multimodales », Geneviève Brisson and Magali Forte “think with theory” in their discussion of activities they observed in Vancouver-area classrooms, homes and a library. For the past decade Brisson and Forte have been working with the multilingual and multimodal ScribJab website/digital toolkit developed at Simon Fraser University. They insist on the useful distinction “perspective translangagière” and “approche translangagière” to make it clear that the more broadly based “perspective” on translanguaging as a way to view linguistic interaction generally should not be lumped together with the “approach” to pedagogical practices (in this case ScribJab-generated) that they observed. Using the perspective to illuminate the practices (i.e., “thinking with theory,” a thought process which for them includes methodology), Brisson and Forte analyze interview data from learners and a teacher, as well as the actual productions learners created with ScribJab. They conclude that despite the considerable potential of ScribJab to enable translanguaging activities both by and with learners, a colonially-based monolingual mindset unfortunately (and surprisingly) still lies at the root of the way the software was designed and of the way even the most enlightened teachers view their English-language-teaching task.
Sarah Jones gives us a conceptual overview of recent theoretical developments in her paper “Plurilingualism, plurilinguals, and pluri-positionality: Empowering speakers in relation to norms.” She asks the question “How does plurilingualism serve to empower speakers, regardless of linguistic background, in relation to normative standards of language use?” and embarks on a useful problematization and redefinition of the key concepts “plurilingualism,” “plurilingual speakers” and “norms.” Jones goes all the way back to the 1960s work of Gumperz in her discussion of linguistic repertoire, bringing the notion up to the present day with a full treatment of the different ways “plurilingualism,” “multilingualism” and other terms (with which the reader will doubtless be familiar) have been defined and used in recent years. Moving through a discussion of agency, Jones points out how important plurilingual pedagogical practices can be in contemporary classrooms, thus connecting seamlessly with Brisson & Forte’s implied call in the preceding article to make pedagogical practices more truly plurilingual. The article winds up with a more general plea for broadly based perspectives on plurilingualism to enter into widespread use outside classrooms, a view with which this journal is fully in agreement.
We move from plurilingual theory and its potential applications in classrooms to the very concrete, data-based territory of the ways ordinary Canadian speakers engage with each other in their casual interactions, specifically when white Canadians perceive “otherness” in a new acquaintance. In “‘I get asked that all the time’: Confronting polite, white Canadians and the politics of belonging in obligatory interrogations,” Karen Pennesi incorporates critical race theory into a discursive approach to politeness to examine a type of microaggression which she calls obligatory interrogations. Most of us like to think that we are always polite. In fact, politeness, as Pennesi points out, “reflects the views of powerful groups”—in this case, white English-speaking Canadians with British-based names. Obligatory interrogations of the “But where are you really from?” type are all too familiar to those of us with “different” names who may be non-white and/or speak English with a “non-native” accent. Through an exploration of data collected during interviews with over fifty participants in London, ON and Montreal, QC, Pennesi exposes the racism underlying these obligatory interrogations in merciless, sometimes disturbing detail. The interrogations are obligatory because the Othered person being nailed to the spot by the nice polite white Canadian questioner can’t get away from them, nor refuse to answer without themselves being considered rude — a phenomenon with which many readers may be only all too familiar. In Pennesi’s work, with which readers of this journal may be familiar (our very first issue in 2017 featured an earlier Pennesi piece on the tribulations experienced by bearers of “unusual” names), the supposedly polite people initiating these obligatory interrogations are, very satisfyingly, not allowed to get off the hook.
In our next article, a team of four researchers—three of them doctoral students at the time of writing and one their mentor during workshops at the University of Calgary in 2019—share their perspectives on what it means to develop a teacher identity across four different national, linguistic and cultural contexts. Jonathan Purdy (Australia), Lena Barrantes Elizondo (Costa Rica), Li Pei (China) and Sylvie Roy (Canada/Quebec) title their paper “On nurturing our teacher identities through a polyethnographic lens.” We learn about their different trajectories through this polyethnographic paper, involving reflective conversations analyzed post hoc through the regressive, progressive, analytical and synthetical processes laid out by William Pinar in the approach to understanding teacher identity he calls “currere.” As the four authors point out, their collaboration is an example of the value of sharing experiences from transdisciplinarity and transculturality. Through their conversations, we follow the community-building process that continues to sustain this group despite their current far-flung locations. The difficult personal work required to become an effective and confident professional teacher is, as readers will know, much more easily accomplished in a community than alone. This article can stand as an example and model of that process.
Our next article, by Mélissa Villella, keeps us within the bounds of teacher identity as it is constructed and perceived by practitioners, but in a very different context. Villella takes us into the rather hermetic universe of Ontario’s minority francophone school system, where she shows us that the supposed shortage of Francophone teachers is in fact a shortage of white francophone teachers. In « On parlait pu de la compétence de la personne » : Le leadership et la soi-disant pénurie du personnel enseignant francophone selon la théorie de la race et de la langue,” Villella draws on LangCrit (critical language and race theory) to highlight the way in which the intersection of race and language in minority francophone contexts is determined. Starting with a discussion of racism at large in Canadian society, Villella narrows her focus to zero in on anti-Black racism, in Canada, in Ontario, in Ontario’s schooling system and specifically in Ontario’s French-language schooling system. From a more extensive database of interviews, she has selected two for in-depth analysis in this article. Both teachers are white and francophone de souche, with different levels of exposure to the principles of anti-racist education. Neither is able fully to overcome the cultural baggage they bring with them when asked to interact with non-white teachers, newly arrived in Canada and from very different educational traditions. Villella makes a clear case for more anti-racist education being badly needed, both for pre-service and (perhaps even more urgently) for in-service teachers and for administrators in this school system—one is inclined to think, in most school systems in North America, given the shortage of licensed local teachers and the large number of qualified teachers from elsewhere who have trouble getting into the system.
Book Review
Charu Gupta reviews a 2024 monograph for us, Teaching where you are: Weaving Indigenous and slow principles and pedagogies, by Shannon Leddy & Lorrie Miller, in useful detail. Combining textile-based metaphors with Indigenous pedagogical traditions and knowledges as well as “Slow” pedagogies, Leddy & Miller (as interpreted by Gupta) explore ways to more effectively decolonise education in British Columbia, and by extension elsewhere. Gupta draws on her own background as a recently arrived multilingual educator in Canada to show how this book helped her to connect to her positionality on, and responsibility to, the land. This is the kind of connection we could all benefit from understanding better for ourselves.
